Grafting a fresh cure for asthma: Could the common ground between asthma and organ rejection lead to alternative treatments for one of the West's most debilitating diseases?

Transplant surgery is at the glamorous, high-profile end of medicine; treating asthma certainly is not. Yet the success of both depends on doctors being able to manipulate the body's immune system, to prevent organ rejection in one case and the overzealous immune responses which appear to cause asthma attacks in the other. Given this link, might drugs that successfully prevent organ rejection also work as therapies for asthma? And could researchers use their knowledge of the immunology of organ rejection to solve the biological puzzle of asthma?

At the National Heart and Lung Institute in London we are trying to find out. Over the past six years we have been searching for clues as to what goes wrong in the immune systems of people with asthma, asking whether the faults can be corrected with substances such as cyclosporin A, a drug which has been used for the past decade to ...

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